Great day in the morning, Madge has finally learned the Magic Words.

What are the Magic Words, you ask?  Are they, as your mother taught you, "please" and "thank you"?

C'mon, get with it grandpa.  Those days are dead and gone.  And since you haven't been paying attention since the days of Romper Rooms and Captain Kangaroo, let me hip you to the fact that the "new" magic words are at least 30 years old.  

Here's a excerpt from Marjorie Taylor Green's Friday night Tweet.  See if you can spot the real Magic Words:

I never thought that fighting to release the Epstein files, defending women who were victims of rape, and fighting to expose the web of rich powerful elites would have caused this, but here we are.

And it truly speaks for itself.

There needs to be a new way forward.

The toxic political industrial complex thrives on ripping us all apart but never delivers anything good for the American people, whom I love.

The PIC tells us to hate each other, fundraises off why we have to hate each other, and pits Americans against each other to the point of violence and nearing civil war.

This is all so wrong.

We can have our own differences and differing opinions but we can still love and respect one another.

We have far more in common than we have apart.

I believe in the American people more than I believe in any leader or political party and the American people deserve so much better than how they have been treated by both sides of the aisle...

7.1 million views as of this morning.  Hundreds howler MAGA howler monkeys shrieking various versions of ,"Nobody cares about the Epstein files!  How dare you question the Dear Leader! Burn in Hell bad lady!"  

None of it matters.

Madge is a creature of low cunning and ruthless survival instincts, so if she is learning how to speak pidgin Beltway -- 

--, framing her slow motion egress from Il Douche's pandemonium bandwagon as an act of high principle, and showing up on places like The View to claim she was the victim, and coronate herself into the ranks of the media's Serious Women with Powerful Voices -- 

...“You’ve broken from the Republican Party on a number of issues, including, besides the shutdown, the war in Gaza, tariffs, Trump’s desire to expand AI, foreign aid,” Hostin said. “But you’ve also had the clips highlighting the public, very public spats that you’ve had with your colleagues, where your behavior, some say, is just unbecoming for a congresswoman. And you’re promoting conspiracy theories like QAnon in the past. But you seem to have grown past that…why the change? Why the evolution?”

“Maybe you should become a Democrat, Marjorie,” Joy Behar added, complimenting Greene’s comprehensible explanations for her positions, many of which earned her applause from the show’s anti-MAGA studio audience.

“You’re so right, it’s like you’re on the left now,” Hostin also told Green.

“I’m not on the left,” she told the View hosts, “I haven’t changed,” though she admitted of QAnon, “I was a victim, just like you were, of social media lies and stuff you read on social media.”

Greene cemented the friendly interview when she concluded, “I believe that people with powerful voices, like myself and like you, and especially women to women, we need to pave a new path.”...

-- you can bet she can practically smell the sheer cliff's edge off of which that bandwagon is about to plunge.  

The fact-free coddle-fest last night ("Fox Business gives Ben Carson a free pass in GOP debate") offered many, many hilariously false statements for your 'umble scrivener to choose from -- lies cheerfully extruded by the yard by the Fox News employees behind the lecterns, and just as cheerfully ignored by the "elegant" Fox News employees who fed them stage direction from behind the moderator desk.

So I thought today I would pick out one that will probably be missed by almost everyone else.

From Marco Rubio, the Wandering Senator, last night (emphasis added):

...

Here's the best way to raise wages. Make America the best place in the world to start a business or expand an existing business, tax reform and regulatory reform, bring our debt under control, fully utilize our energy resources so we can reinvigorate manufacturing, repeal and replace Obamacare, and make higher education faster and easier to access, especially vocational training. For the life of me, I don't know why we have stigmatized vocational education. Welders make more money than philosophers. We need more welders and less philosophers.

First, it's "fewer" philosophers, not "less".  Dumbass.

Second, the best manufacturers I know do indeed value their welders (who can pass a drug test. It's a thing)...and CNC operators...and mold-makers...who are also lateral thinkers that can evaluate weird, complex problems and work out creative solutions.  You can study both.  Dumbass.

Third, without philosophy students, Soundgarden may never have existed.  Dumbass.  (From the American Philosophical Association, "Who Studies Philosophy?")

Kim Thayil, musician (Soundgarden)

On the other hand, without a certain philosophy student, history might have been changed just enough to spare Hewlett-Packard the reign of the Destroyer of Companies:

Carly Fiorina, former CEO of Hewlett-Packard and presidential candidate
Bachelor’s Degree, Stanford University, 1976

You know what?  It turns out lots of gainfully-employed people you may have heard about have studied philosophy along the way.  Lots and lots.  Here is a partial list:

Thomas Jefferson, U.S. President
Bachelor’s Degree, College of William and Mary, 1762

Fred Thompson, former senator and presidential candidate (and erstwhile actor)
Bachelor’s Degree, University of Memphis, 1964

George F. Will, journalist, author, and political commentator
Bachelor’s Degree, Trinity College, 1962

Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., civil rights leader
Taught social philosophy at Morehouse College, 1961

Carl Icahn, investor and former CEO of TWA Airlines
Bachelor’s Degree, Princeton University, 1957

Peter Thiel, founder of PayPal
Bachelor’s Degree, Stanford University, 1989

Pope John Paul II
Ph.D., Jagiellonian University, 1948

Albert Schweitzer, Nobel Peace Prize winning theologian and missionary
Ph.D., University of Tübingen, 1899

Christopher Hitchens, author
Bachelor’s Degree, Balliol College Oxford, 1967

Sam Harris, author (The End of Faith) and co-founder of Project Reason<
Bachelor’s Degree, Stanford University, 2000

Elie Wiesel, author (Night)
Studied at the Sorbonne, 1948-1951

Chris Hayes, journalist, political commentator, and MSNBC host
Bachelor’s Degree, Brown University, 2001

Wes Anderson, filmmaker
Bachelor’s Degree, University of Texas at Austin, 1990

Harrison Ford, actor
Majored in philosophy at Ripon College (no degree earned), 1960-1964

Steve Martin, comedian, actor, and musician
Majored in philosophy at California State University Long Beach (no degree earned), 1963-1967

Phil Jackson, NBA coach
Bachelor’s Degree, University of North Dakota, 1967

Bruce Lee, martial artist
Studied philosophy at University of Washington (no degree earned), 1961-1964

Ayn Rand, author (The Fountainhead, Atlas Shrugged)
Bachelor’s Degree, Petrograd State University, 1924

So...why does Marco Rubio hate Ayn Rand and Han Solo?

Finally, I agree that we should be doing a lot more to offer every American a ladder (well, "lattice", if you want to get technical and wonky) into the middle class by strategically strengthening America's manufacturing base and offering a program of life-long career education and training starting in high school.

You know who else believe that?

Barack Obama, who campaigned on this very subject back in 2008 before he was ever elected president.  Here he is, taking specifically about Austin Polytech high school in Chicago and about which I have written from time to time:

Stravinsky's "Sacrificial Dance" from "The Rite of Spring"

From the David Sirota at HuffPo:

CNN Debate on Van Jones: Obama Sells Us Out to Political Terrorist Glenn Beck & His Lynch Mob

...
Somehow, nobody gets fired for lying us into Iraq, Tim Geithner keeps his job after tax evasion and gift scandals, Republican Congresspeople remain credible while championing the "birther" lunacy -- but Van Jones must be fired for carelessly signing a petition years ago, which he later apologized for.

As I said on CNN, the hypocrisy uncovers the real truth of this whole affair: Van Jones was targeted by the political terrorist known as Glenn Beck -- the man who leads a 21st century lynch mob looking to hunt down anyone (and especially anyone black) who has ever been a part of progressive movement politics. I don't use that term "political terrorist" lightly. According to the dictionary, a terrorist is "a person who terrorizes or frightens others" -- and usually does so with an ideological objective. There are, of course, many different kinds of terrorists, and I'd say Beck -- with his fearmongering, paranoia and hate -- fits the letter and spirit of the dictionary definition of a political terrorist quite well. Indeed, just listen to this clip or look at this not-so-veiled threat and then try to claim with a straight face that Beck isn't explicitly using the mass media to scare and terrorize people.

In placating the demands of this terrorist and his lynch mob, the Obama administration has simultaneously empowered that terrorist and that lynch mob, while abandoning its own progressive base.
...

I get that politics is rough. And I always figured that once they shook off their initial shock, the Right would be coming after President Obama every day with everything they had in Lee Atwater and Karl Rove's vast and toxic bad of tricks. That unless he broke them brought them to heel early and and firmly, the Right's relentless, berserker attacks on the Obama Administration would make the Clinton Years seem positively Coolidge-y.

What pisses the hell out of me is that -- based on his flat-footed reaction to these first, few Flying Monkey Wave Attacks -- no one seems to have pointed out this fairly pedestrian and widely-held observation about the inexorable laws of political cause-and-effect to the leader of the Free World. Barack Obama seemed to have believed his own hype that mad-dog politics was somehow just another bit of petty Baby Boomer legacy narcissism that he was free to eschew; some antique bong he could politely refuse as it was passed around the Beltway, instead of a rabid political reality that was gonna climb right up his ass no matter how nicely he "Just Said No".

And so, thanks to some cocktail of arrogance and infuriating naivete, the point person for one of the Obama Administration's critical Big Five Initiatives -- Green Jobs and the environment -- gets tossed under the bus, leaving a vital post leaderless when it most needs direction, and leaving the Administration looking weak and gullible when they most need to appear strong and confident.

About all of which, more later.

Meanwhile, far, far away on a seemingly unrelated topic:

The Green Mayor's Green Policy Maker Leaves for Vancouver

Posted by Mick Dumke

Mayor Daley has been saying for years that he wants to make Chicago the greenest city in the country, but his environmental record is decidedly mixed.

After the mayor, no one has been as deeply involved in the administration's successes and as evasive about its shortfalls as Sadhu Johnston, Daley's chief environmental officer, deputy chief of staff, and frequent cheerleader.

But Johnston won't be on hand to offer justifications or lead the applause for Mayor Daley much longer: he's leaving at the end of this month to become the deputy city manager of Vancouver.
...

So what do these two things have to do with each other?

Well, Van Jones is an inspiring speaker and organizer, enjoys a fine rep outside of those regions of Murrica where folks don't have to take off their socks to cipher up to 20, and his selfless act of political impalement on behalf of the Obama Administration over trivia means the President of the United States owes him some fairly heavy political giri.

His expertise also puts him squarely at the nexus of three of the non-Olympics-based issues most important to Da Mare -- the environment, finding Chicago's footing in the new Green Economy, and coping with the massive influx of ex-offenders (approximately 20,000 each year) into the city -- at precisely that moment in time when the City's Green Policy Wizard suddenly decided to take off

to the Great White North.

Not for nothing, but it seems to me that any halfway smart Chicago administrator could figure out a way to transmute the Obama Administration's craven mistake into something of genuine value for our city.

Especially given that around here, referring to Republicans as "assholes" is considered less of a career-crippling faux pas than it is a civic responsibility. And, occasionally, a sanctioned, semi-professional sport.